Recently the Washington Post published an infographic that explored the cable network that connects the different continents and brings to each the internet. In short, where North America once dominated as an international hub it now is on the decline.
Where undersea cables land in North America
The piece tells an interesting story supported by good data that is clearly presented. Clear and informative titles prompt the reader along the piece while good chart forms show just what is happening to internet bandwidth and continental differences. And from a design perspective, this is all done with what appears to be two colours: a dark green and its shades/tints, and black. Overall, a solid piece.
Today’s graphic looks at the backlog of aircraft delivery, i.e. the manufacturing of civilian aircraft. Why? Because Boeing is attempting to increase production of its 787 Dreamliner. And this weekend I arrived in Chicago from Warsaw via a 787.
This is a really nice piece from Thomson Reuters that looks at the manufacturing lines for both Boeing and Airbus and how many planes have yet to be delivered. The annotations really help to explain some of the stories behind some of the aircraft and their delayed deliveries.
Aircraft manufacturing backlog
Credit for the piece goes to Simon Scarr and Christian Inton.
After two weeks out of the country, I come back and find early this morning (thanks, jet lag) an interactive article published by the New York Times on income mobility. What does that mean? From a medium side, a long narrative interspersed with charts and graphics with which the user can interact to uncover specific data about specific elements in the dataset. From a content side, income mobility means the movement of an individual from one group of money earned to another, e.g. a poor person becoming a millionaire. The piece is fantastic and you should take the time to go read and interact with it.
A map shows the broad context of the data to be looked at in the story
For some time now I have harped on about the need to annotate and contextualise datasets. Too often, large datasets paralyse people; their eyes glaze over and they simply gaze at a graphic without seeing the data, the story, the information. Little notes and blurbs of text can help people synthesise what they see with what they read with what they know to gain better understanding. But in this piece, by combining a lengthy article—very well written although that is not the focus of this post—with powerful interactive maps and graphics, the New York Times has created a powerful piece that states and then proves the point of the article. And while doing all of that, by making the datasets explorable, the Times also allows you to find your own stories.
A story-like piece lets you choose an area and an income to see how the article's topic plays out
Lastly, in the credits section at the end you will see this piece required the input of eight individuals (though I know not in what particular capacities). Clearly, for the Times this is not about to become a regular type of infographic/datavis/journalism piece. But when will skill sets be democratised or dispersed enough that smaller teams can create similar scale projects? That will be interesting to see. However, the Times certainly leads the States if not the world in some of the best information design pieces and undoubtedly this will push other publishers of similar content in this direction.
Ultimately people want to know who's best and who's worse and where they fall and this chart does that at the end of the piece
Credit for the piece goes to Mike Bostock, Shan Carter, Amanda Cox, Matthew Ericson, Josh Keller, Alicia Parlapiano, Kevin Quealy, and Josh Williams.
I should be returning to Chicago this weekend. And if I were returning 21,000 years ago, that would be I would have been returning to a massive ice sheet covering the city. Would have been way worse in Montreal, though.
This network diagram from the New York Times looks at a community of doctors with respect to a prescription oncology drug. Colour is used to denote types of doctors while size denotes the volume of prescriptions for any oncology drug. Admittedly, I am not keen of the bubble effect placed on the circles. Those effects and the heavy black outlines for the circles distract a bit, but not excessively so.
Network diagram of doctors
What really makes this graphic, as is making so many of the Times’ graphics, is the annotation and explanation of the presented data. The user can readily see how some doctors are connected, but understanding the shapes and patterns of those connections is not as clear. But then the Times furthers that by explaining how the marketers of this oncology drug would use this data.
Credit for this piece goes to the New York Times graphics team.
If all is going according to plan, I should be somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains at this point, specifically in the Presov region of Slovakia. So as a reminder of just what that means, here is a (recycled) piece I created this time last year about the Carpatho-Rusyns (sometimes known as Ruthenians) living in Slovakia. Click the image to go to the full infographic.
Cropping of the Rusyns of Slovakia
Credit goes to me for the piece, but to the statistics office of Slovakia for the data.
If you look at senators who voted with other senators at least 50% of the time and at least 75% of the time, and compare those numbers to numbers over a decade ago, you can see there is a lot less bipartisanship in 2013.
Compare 2013…
75 percent shared votes in 201350 percent shared votes in 2013
to 2001.
75 percent shared votes in 200150 percent shared votes in 2001
It’s Friday. So what else could you want but cat videos?! On the internet?!
But seriously, that’s what I have for you today. But with a twist. The BBC and the Royal Veterinary College collaborated to document a day in the life of cats by attaching collars with micro-cameras and GPS trackers to several felines in one English village. Cats are selected by illustration at the top of the graphic. Their day’s walking path is traced out over the village while video clips of some of the more interesting parts of the day are available to watch.
A day in the life of Phoebe the cat
Credit for the piece goes to Steven Atherton, Chris Finch, Alex Ranken, Lucy Rodgers, Helene Sears, Marina Shchukina, and Noah Veltman.
Hong Kong—and to a similar extent Macau—is part of China, but at times not so much. Because of the long history of British control through their colony, the people of Hong Kong, Hongkongers, are accustomed to a more liberal, democratic, and perhaps Western lifestyle than those of mainland China. Since the British handover, a local university has been asking the inevitable question of “Are you Hongkonger or Chinese?”. This interactive piece from the South China Morning Post looks at how that answer has evolved over nearly 20 years.
Hongkonger identity
The piece presents a broad overview on the right with the specific survey results displayed larger on the left. Broadly speaking, the piece is successful. In particular, the decision to highlight the particular survey on the right brings that into focus without losing the context of the historical results. And providing a timeline beneath the larger stacked bar chart on the left offers a second means of choosing a survey of interest.
Yet I think the piece lacks two, perhaps three, elements that would improve the piece. First, sometimes I like to see the numbers for data visualisations. Adding a hover or mouseover state would help with that. Second, while the chart on the left includes a 50% line, I wonder if that would not also be helpful in the historical display on the right. Thirdly, and perhaps not too important for those not terribly interested in the data, the overall piece states the sample size for all surveys being within a range. People wanting more data on the survey responses might be interested in seeing the sample size per survey.
Credit for the piece goes to Simon Scarr and Joe Lo.
